Coach Les Miles, center, and his top-ranked LSU Tigers will have the inside track to the BCS championship game if they can get past No. 2 Alabama in the Nov. 5 SEC showdown in Tuscaloosa. If Alabama wins, the Tide will likely play for the national title.

So I’m minding my own business in a Seattle sports bar Saturday night, and the guy next to me finds out I’m a college football writer. I could’ve predicted the next question as if I passed a homeless man with a cup.

“When are we getting a playoff?”

The week before, I’m in a bar near Stanford and a group of Cardinal fans find out I’m a college football writer. (You’ve heard of chick magnets? Sportswriters are guy magnets, unfortunately.) Guess what they asked.

“When are we getting a playoff?”

Imagine how many fans have asked that question this week since the first BCS standings came out Sunday. The list includes 10 unbeaten teams at the halfway point, the most this late in the year since the BCS began in 1998.

Never has there been a greater need for a Plus-One.

The potential of again winding up with more than one unbeaten at season’s end is as large as Andrew Luck’s potential in the NFL. The smart money is the winner of the Nov. 5 LSU-Alabama game playing Oklahoma, if it wins at Oklahoma State on Dec. 3, for the national title.

But find a team that can beat unbeaten Wisconsin if Michigan State can’t do it Saturday. Or Stanford if it beats Oregon on Nov. 12. Add in Boise State, Houston and Clemson, if it keeps overachieving, and you potentially have seven unbeatens at year’s end. (Kansas State will fold.) Also, a one-loss LSU or Alabama could be the second-best team in the land.

Sure, unbeatens at the halfway point are usually weeded out, but not always. Remember 2004, when Auburn stood 13-0 with nothing to show for it but a Sugar Bowl watch? Who says Utah couldn’t have held its own against Florida in 2008? Weren’t you curious to see how TCU’s defense would match up against Auburn’s Cam Newton?

Coming to the rescue, supposedly, is Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson. This week he revealed his proposal for a 16-team playoff he says would produce $700 million, walloping the $182 million the BCS generated last year.

His plan is for all 11 conference champions making the tournament — but only if they’re ranked in the top 30. The remaining slots would be filled with at-large teams. Home stadiums and BCS bowls would host various playoff rounds with schools’ payouts increasing as they advance.

According to Thompson, a team reaching the title game would get about $95 million as opposed to the current $14 million.

Hold a fan vote and this would be as big a landslide as Nixon-McGovern in ’72. Thompson presented his plan to conference commissioners in September, but it has no more chance than his eight-team proposal that got shot down in 1999. With Thompson’s plan, a three-loss team that gets hot could make the playoffs. That would reduce September’s nonconference games to an exhibition season. How much interest would LSU-Oregon have had if it had no bearing at season’s end?

And, as Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News noted, the plan doesn’t consider how TV rights fees would drop when the regular season gets watered down to one level above the NHL’s.

As I’ve said for, oh, nine years now, a Plus-One plan is perfect. Let’s take this season. Using the current bowl system, and if the season played out as I think it might, the Sugar Bowl (site of this season’s BCS championship) would host No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 4 Wisconsin. The Rose Bowl hosts No. 2 Oklahoma vs. No. 3 LSU. The winners play one week later to a payday that would buy a lot of tennis balls for Colorado and Iowa State.

Last August, the Pac-12 and Big Ten athletic directors supported a Plus-One in a straw poll, and in 2008 the SEC and ACC proposed a Plus-One at the BCS meetings. It didn’t pass, but it’s clear the landscape has changed.

It can’t happen until the BCS’s current TV deal ends after the 2013 season, and it may not happen after that.

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said Thursday, “People are willing to discuss it, but it’s very premature to suggest that the winds are blowing in any direction or not.”

You can bet if there’s a handful of unbeatens in January, more than a few people in this country will be willing to discuss it.